High up on a hill in Dorset sits the picturesque village of Ashmore. Dorset is known for its chalk hilltop settlements such as Hambledon Hill which date back thousands of years, but Ashmore is unique because it is still inhabited. The attraction for living on a hilltop in the past was for protection, today it is for the view, but the obvious disadvantage is how do you retain enough water on the porous chalk to live? The answer is with difficulty, hence why they were all abandoned, except Ashmore. At the centre of the village is a pond. The date of the pond’s instillation is hard to determine, but somewhere in the Roman or Saxon period a clay lined pond was constructed, around which trees grew up, hence its name Ash – mere (tree – pond).
As interesting as the local history is, and I do find it fascinating, it was not why I came to visit Ashmore on a beautiful spring evening. It wasn’t the village, or anything which could be seen above the surface of the pond which drew me there, but what lay beneath. Somewhere there in the bottom, in the silt lay memories. Not distant memories of those who lived long ago, although no doubt their stories still linger there too, but memories of a more recent past, although they too are receding into the distance at what seems to me an alarming rate. It is a living memory, of tyre tracks imprinted into the soft mud, and although the tracks themselves have filled in over the last fifty years the memory is still indelibly engraved in my mind.
My day had started in London on a rather unmemorable dull grey morning, where I caught a train from Waterloo down to Salisbury. To be honest I was a little nervous about how this trip was going to work out. It had kind of been a last-minute plan hastily arranged over the phone, which seemed alright at the time but sitting on the train I started to have my doubts. I was travelling down to meet a friend of mine, not just any friend but the person other than my brother who has known me longest in my life. When I think about it, that is quite something. Our plan was to celebrate fifty years of friendship since we first met at a boarding school in Dorset. Funnily enough we actually only lived about a mile from each other, but we never knew each other and it is one of those funny coincidences life sometimes throws your way that we would end up at the same school a hundred miles away.
Fifty years is a long time, a lot has happened in both our lives since then. Successes, failures, good times, bad times, relationships formed and broken. When we left school, we both returned home to live, but I only stayed a few years before I moved to the west coast of America while Pete, although he travelled extensively for work still lives in the same place he grew up. Not only has time separated us but an ocean and continent too! How has our friendship survived? Often time and space apart is enough to bring a friendship to a close especially in the pre internet age. It’s not so much the friendship is officially ended, or there is an acrimonious break up, you just simply lose touch as new life engulfs you. These days through social media it is possible to establish contact with friends from days past. I think of someone and type their name into the search bar and voila, there they are! Older and greyer, and pictures of them with children and others I have never seen.
My finger hovers over the friend invite button. But then I think of how it was a long time ago in a different phase of life, and would they really appreciate hearing from me? I am not so certain, so I go back to scrolling. Friendships are mostly built around a shared stage of life or activity such as school but when the stage or activity ends then often so does the friendship. Of course, we promise we will keep in touch as we move away, leave our job, stop playing on the team and no doubt we are sincere, but deep down we know the friendship we had is coming to a close. Even if we are able to maintain it it won’t be the same. We are no longer thrust together in our everyday life, so it takes a lot of commitment to continue to meet because new life and demands get in the way, and the gaps between meeting up grow longer until the friendship just becomes a fading memory. There is only so much of us to go around. Often, we don’t realise just how much time has elapsed until it is too late. I have seen it many times at funerals, friends of the deceased are shocked at how long it has been since they have seen the person in the coffin and each other. The person in the coffin they can do nothing about except eulogise, but the death motivates them to promise each other “we must get together and not leave it so long” but then as they drive away once again their separate lives distract them, and despite their best intentions, the promised meet up is deferred until the next funeral where the ritual is repeated.
The train pulled into Salisbury station and I grabbed my bag and disembarked. The sky had brightened considerably and despite the forecast it looked like it might turn into a nice afternoon. I walked into the city centre; half of the roads seemed to be dug up, one way of reducing traffic I suppose. Ten minutes later I arrived at the hotel we were staying at, and Pete was in the lobby waiting for me. We did that awkward English thing where neither of us knew whether just to shake hands or hug and end up looking rather silly. We certainly looked different to the two thirteen-year olds who met for the first time fifty years before!
Later in the afternoon we went for a drive; a trip down memory lane. Our first stop was Shaftesbury, not a place which held a lot of memories for me. We parked and walked to Gold Hill. I actually don’t remember ever having gone there before, but what a glorious view in the late afternoon sunshine. The quintessential English pastoral landscape stretched out before me. About the time Pete and I were meeting at school for the first time Ridley Scott was here filming a boy pushing his bike up it to take his “bread to the top of the world.” The advert was built on nostalgia for a time and place which never existed but has itself become a strong memory for millions. There is a large Hovis loaf at the top of the hill to remind those who have forgotten of those distant tracks.
Gold Hill Shaftsbury
I never pushed my bike up Gold Hill or rode down it, but I did ride my bike all around that area of Dorset. It was an old three speed hand me down from my father, and although I had protested and asked for something more modern, my protestations were in vain. We rode our bikes everywhere exploring the surrounding countryside. It was our only means of escape from the school grounds, and it was often on these excursions where friendships were made and cemented as they are in shared experiences. It was only after a week or two of being at school that Pete and I made several long bike rides together.
Our next destination was Ashmore. This was actually one of the first bike rides we had gone on, and as we drove up the lane to the village, I marvelled that we had thought nothing of riding up there. We arrived and got out of the car. We stood there in the silence absorbing the tranquil scene. Then the memory rose from beneath the surface of the day we made those tyre prints in the mud as we joyfully rode our bikes through the pond disturbing the tranquillity of a lazy Sunday afternoon.
We continued our drive, past Fontwell Magna which also has a pond where we actually had to abandon our bikes when we were chased by an angry swan. Then a few miles further down the road off to the right, there it was. From first sight it appeared much the same as it had the first time we saw it. The large main house where we had first met. Funnily enough almost the very spot was immortalised years later in the Only Fools and Horses episode “touch of glass.” Grandad descends the stairs blissfully unaware of the smashed chandelier beneath him. “Alright Del Boy?” Del;”Alright? What do you mean alright? Look at it!” Grandad; “Did you drop it?” Rodney; “Drop it? How could we drop it? We wasn’t even holding it! We were working on that one!” Grandad; “Well I wish you’d said something. I was working on this one! Is it valuable Del?” Del; “No, not really! It was bleeedin’ priceless when it was hanging up there though!” I don’t think our opening conversation was quite as memorable as that.
We drove into the school grounds a bit further up but not much was familiar here. New buildings now occupied the space making it hard for us to uncover the memories which had once been laid there, so we left and drove back to our hotel for supper. Our server asked us about what had bought us to Salisbury and when we told her she thought it was “sweet.” I wasn’t so sure that it was so sweet that now we had become the two old codgers sitting in the corner reminiscing over a pint.
Salisbury Cathedral
Before we embarked on our drive down/around memory lane we walked from our hotel to the Cathedral. Built in 1258 the spire towers 400′ above; the tallest in England. Unusually Salisbury Cathedral was built in one generation. We paid our entrance fee and went in. A school choir occupied the choir stalls practicing for evensong, the sound of their voices and the organ soaring up to the high gothic ceilings. It bought back more memories of when I too on several occasions as part of the school choir sang here. I sat and listened to them sing for ten minutes or so until their practice time finished. Released, the kids spilled out of the stalls, some glued to their phones, while others chatted happily away. I wondered in fifty years’ time how many would still be friends? How many would even be in any sort of contact with each other? Would they remember the tracks they were laying down that afternoon, or would they vanish beneath the surface, swallowed up by all the future events of life so not even leaving a trace.
An often-used quote of J.R.R. Tolkien regarding the creative inspiration for his stories, is I think worth repeating in this context.
“One writes such a story [The Lord of the Rings] not out of the leaves of trees still to be observed, nor by means of botany and soil-science; but it grows like a seed in the dark out of the leaf-mould of the mind: out of all that has been seen or thought or read, that has long ago been forgotten, descending into the deeps. No doubt there is much personal selection, as with a gardener: what one throws on one’s personal compost-heap; and my mould is evidently made largely of linguistic matter.”
- J. R. R. Tolkien
Our stories emerge from the tracks which lie beneath our surface. Some are deeply embedded where we rode across soft impressionable ground, but other tracks leave barely a trace because there was nothing to embed them in. Layer upon layer, of these imprints criss cross our souls, unconsciously influencing where we ride today.
Salisbury Cathedral also holds another imprint, housed in the chapter house is one of only four originals of the Magna Carta written in 1251. Although at the time it only granted freedoms to a select few it was the first track laid down on the path for the freedom we enjoy today. We are free to choose the threads from the past we want to have as friends in the present. For Pete and myself, although we didn’t even communicate with each other for several years as our lives took us in different directions, we have both chosen to allow the tracks from the past to bring us back together.
Magna Carta
For me the most memorable imprint of the Cathedral was not the Magna Carta (I actually don’t remember seeing that before either), or singing as part of a choir, but attending the annual Advent procession; from darkness to light. The service is a visual reminder of Jesus, the light, coming into the world, and so the service starts in darkness and gradually over its course a thousand or so candles are lit, each one illuminating a little bit more of the old building and the flickering memories of the past. How many prayers and pleading have those stones heard? How many knee impressions have been left under the surface of those kneelers? How many descants have soared up the columns?
It seems to me God mostly works under the surface of things. To be sure God is found in life above, but it is out of sight where He lights candles, illuminating our darkness. Sometimes He enters in a blaze of glory but often it is a case of gradual illumination until we arrive at the truth.
It is an amazing thing but God wants to be our friend and he is able to reach down beneath the surface of our lives and gather up all those tracks we have put down, even the ones going nowhere or in the wrong direction, and make a new track leading us to Him.
When the Magna Carta was signed the pope at the time refused to recognise the document; you can’t have kings giving away their God given rights to commoners. But he seems to have forgotten that is exactly what the King of Kings did when He entered into this world. He came down to make tracks on this earth, (although I am not sure He ever rode a bike through a pond, actually He would have ridden across the top of it), tracks which we can follow from the stable in Bethlehem to the cross and empty tomb in Jerusalem if we care to reach beneath the surface of our pond and find them. Jesus wants to be our friend. Whether that is an entirely new friendship or a renewed friendship He wants to give us a reservoir of never ending abundant life in an otherwise porous landscape.
Only Fools and Horses “chandelier” clip
